Putting the garden to bed for the winter - at the end of a hard year

Plus garden tomatoes on Thanksgiving and other unexpected pleasures.

I brought these green tomatoes inside and placed them on a rack in the basement, where they continued to ripen through to the end of November.

Back in the 1980s when I’d also lived in this Midwestern river city that’s glory days are well behind it, we frequently got blizzards. When my family moved here in ‘84, in fact, the region was in the middle of a blizzard, and the clothes we’d brought from California were woefully inadequate. I remember the tingle of frostbite threatening my toes in their thin nylon socks.

But last year it hardly snowed at all, and Anthony and I just ate our own garden tomatoes on Thanksgiving Day.

Not that we were still retrieving them off the vine this late in the year, mind you. I’d filled a wooden pallet tray with as many green tomatoes as it could hold before that first frost, and excitingly, they’ve been slowly ripening here in the basement ever since. You can thus continue to eat them, and if they start to wrinkle from the dryness of the basement and the cooler temps, that might be a good time to dehydrate them all, as there is almost nothing better, nor more truly “umami,” than a dried tomato revived in a dish in the middle of winter. Or should I say a dried tomato reviving a dish at that time of year because that is what the tomato has the power to do.

A couple of years ago, I went to the trouble of bringing tomatoes still clinging to their vines into the basement and draping them under the rafters so they could ripen. That worked, but so did picking them all and setting them in the pallet tray, which was a whole lot easier. Plus, when you bring them in on the vines, spiders come along for the ride, which is fine only if you’re hosting a haunted house in your basement and want them for the ambience.

Who would’ve known you could just pluck green ones off the vine entirely and still get a ripening? That just goes to show you that what you find when you search for a topic on the Internet, as I had with that vine-ripening advice, isn’t always the best.

Nothing beats trying things yourself, and homing into the most optimum practice that way.

Maybe that’s why it’s called best practice. You have to practice until you get to the part that’s best.

What hasn’t been the best is this year, 2023. It got pretty dark for us, so much so that we started calling it ‘the year of dying,’ and when I say we I mean me, because Anthony is one of those optimistic people who remains cheery even when the sky is literally falling right down on his head (I love him for this). The darkest part of the year coincided—as if the weather itself was trying to gaslight us—with the days of most sunshine, the solstice. That’s when I lost my cousin, who died at age 52, and at the same time I lost five chickens, two fruit trees, and the very soul of my business. My ability to earn a livelihood was suddenly in jeopardy. I’d laid off all of my employees, the game-writing work had almost entirely dried up, and even my feature-story pitches, an area I’ve always counted on even when the writing landscape gets tough, were falling flat.

Fortunately, my efforts have been rewarded this fall, as I sold a few articles, landed a couple of new game clients, and several old clients came back with new projects. But then nothing is certain, least of all the future, as I lost my last US client just this week and am now working only for game studios in China, Taiwan, Russia, and Turkey. Some days it feels very much like my country’s preeminence is winking out.

The garden season began in spring with the loss of a beloved pear tree to blight, and cancer claimed my cousin Joel, though he’d lived a year longer than expected. Just as Joel had been granted a bonus year by the Grim Reaper himself, I’d saved the pear tree the year before, or so I thought.

But the specter with his scythe comes to take us all in the end.

It seems fitting this year should begin with deaths out of our control and end with our own murder of a tree.